To help staff operate within its challenging time and resource constraints, Virgin Atlantic Airways has a company-wide project management system that is used for all significant projects, including design activities
Joe Ferry, Head of Design and Service Design at Virgin Atlantic Airways, emphasises that the system does not constitute a design process, merely a way of ensuring that projects progress within time and budgetary constraints. The design process itself, he says, has no formal structure – however it does regularly follow the three consecutive stages – R&D, Design Development and Implementation.
Designers can be involved in a number of projects simultaneously, each of which may be at a different stage. Each stage involves a number of milestones outlined in the following sections. This process does differ for service design projects which have added complexity due to the multiple stakeholders involved.
The design process at Virgin Atlantic Airways begins with a research stage during which ideas are deliberately kept as fluid as possible. The R&D phase starts with what the company calls a Product Challenge. This could be a recognition by the company that there might be a need to carry out some particular activity, either to boost performance or to prevent a decline in performance (for example as ageing infrastructure or competitor activities reduce the distinctiveness of Virgin Atlantic’s offering). Or it could be the result of brainstorming or blue-sky thinking in response to a challenge from, say, the CEO.
Then the project moves into the Opportunity Identifier (OI) stage, where Ferry and his team take a project idea to the Product and Service senior directors group and put the case forward for an initial release of funds to conduct scoping work. At this point, budgets and timelines begin to be set and risks are assessed. If approved, funding is released for the preparation of a piece of work that will, as Ferry puts it, ‘help us understand how much we need to develop a detailed business case.’
The Product Brief builds on the OI concept, incorporating commercial awareness and also formulating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including less tangible KPIs based on customer satisfaction as well as return on investment.
The Business Case for a new design project is built in a dialogue between the design team and the business unit in charge of the project. The dialogue is essential says Ferry, to ensure that all stakeholders are committing to something they believe can be delivered under the financial and time constraints. Rapid execution of design processes is important at Virgin Atlantic Airways. For example, its latest clubhouse, at Narita airport in Japan, opened in June 2007. The design process for it began three months earlier, in March. CEO input in the design process begins, says Ferry ‘at day one.’
Obtaining board approval for new product development and design investment is not an easy task according to Ferry, who says he must often fight hard to be given the resource he wants for a project - ‘We are popular at the end of a project,’ he says, ‘but not at the beginning’ – and there is considerable investment of Ferry’s time into creating what he calls ‘a robust justification’ for investment. The Business Case will often include the presentation of fully developed mock-up designs and a Detailed Design Specification, both key tools with which to gain buy-in from the senior level. The creation of a Detailed Design Specification involves deep collaboration between Virgin Atlantic’s in-house design team and the external consultancies from which they outsource expertise.
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As a project enters the ‘design development’ phase, there are a series of checks in place to essentially ensure that the final product is as close as physically possible to the Detailed Design Specification (DDS).
This involves designers and engineers working very closely with manufacturers and there are a number of key milestone meetings throughout this phase:
- ITCM: Initial Technical Coordination Meeting - This is the first meeting where the DDS will be presented to manufacturers to make sure that is the design is possible to manufacture: for example that it would be possible to reach the necessary weight target with the existing design
- PDR: Preliminary Design Review - At this meeting, the manufacturer presents their understanding and interpretation of the design to the designers. Up to this point, there is some flexibility to revisit the Business Case as design development progresses, this will not necessitate repeated formal sign-offs unless a major problem has arisen that requires significant additional funds to rectify
- CDR: Critical Design Review - At this stage, both parties agree on a common interpretation and it is agreed that this design can and will be manufactured. It is a ‘cardinal sin’ to make changes after this point
- FAI: First Article Inspection - This is when the first item is taken off the production line to ensure that it is fully functional etc. This can run in parallel with the following production stage as different components can be produced and assessed in parallel at any one time.
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In this phase, production (which can run in parallel with the first article inspection phase) is followed by implementation, snagging in the aircraft environment, and then finally the evaluation of the project’s KPIs. During the implementation stage it’s key that expensive aircraft downtime is minimised and as a way of managing risk, products are usually ready and in storage up to six months before the scheduled roll-out begins.
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The vast majority of design projects at Virgin Atlantic involve the use of one or more external consultancies. The Virgin Atlantic internal design team tends to do the ‘front end innovation’ says Ferry, then once need-identification and early solution concepts have been developed, one or more external agencies is often brought in to work alongside the team in order to develop the final solution. Ferry adds that collaboration with highly creative design specialists is one way to ensure that the creative side of the in-house team is constantly ‘invigorated.’
Managing this relationship can mean weekly meetings between the internal and external design teams help to keep both closely aligned, and during critical phases meeting frequency may be higher, with the teams doing ‘whatever it takes to get the project running as smoothly as possible.’ Virgin Atlantic maintains a policy of keeping all its external design suppliers separate. Ferry and his team coordinate the process centrally and little direct agency to agency communication takes place, particularly at the early stages of a project. Ferry is adamant that this separation allows the external consultancies to use their creative capabilities to the full: ‘you need to give the consultancies the space to create and experiment.’
Evaluation of Virgin Atlantic designs is quite extensive. Not only is the company’s senior management ‘a group of frequent fliers who provide extensive feedback,’ it also gives customer the opportunity to fill in detailed evaluation questionnaires – called Xplane – after every flight. The link between interior designs and Xplane data is very robust, says Ferry, with even small changes in seat design, introduced to meet the size constraints of individual aircraft, being reflected in customer response. Virgin Atlantic also uses third party benchmarking data to compare ongoing design satisfaction with that of its competitors.
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